Bringing Russia in from the Cold: Criminology, Erasure and the Global East

Criminology continues to neglect the East from debates on the Global South and Global North. Often defined as ‘demi-oriental’ or ‘other than’, the East is a zone of such grey interdiminancy that it is not quite north and certainly never south. It includes the former USSR. This status confusion creates a pronounced cleavage; a frame of coloniser versus colonised. Inevitably, this has erased a more fluid politics of representation, of contexture. In this paper, I explore contexture through situating the former USSR inside geo-political, carceral discourse. Utilising the case study of a major ESRC research project: In the Gulag’s Shadow: Producing, Consuming and Perceiving Prisons in the Former USSR (2018-2022), I argue that the former USSR is a subaltern Empire, not a place or a region but a relational context. I aim to disrupt assumed categories of coloniser/colonised and contest the geo-politics of criminological knowledge. Moreover, I aim to discuss what we can learn from the Global East about international research collaborations and how played out in a region of great linguistic, cultural and political complexity.

Register

Registrations will close at 12 midday on Wednesday 16th February.  The link will be sent to you later that afternoon. 

Laura Piacentini is Professor of Criminology at the School of Social Work and Social Policy at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Laura studies, writes about and conducts research in the area of punishment and society studies with an emphasis on the former Soviet Union; a region she has been working in for nearly three decades. Laura is Principal Investigator on the major ESRC international study In the Gulag’s Shadow: Producing, Consuming and Perceiving Prisons in the Former USSR (2018-2022), which is multi-university collaboration examining the culture of punishment in Russia and Kazakhstan. This is the first ever empirical and theoretical study on penal culture in the former USSR. Her next book, arising from a Leverhulme Fellowship, is on rights consciousness amongst Russian prisoners. The project used the internet as a research site to examine how prisoners and their families employ media social media in activism and for penal expression. ‘The Virtual Reality of Imprisonment in Russia: “Preparing Myself for Prison” in a Contested Human Rights Landscape’ is out in March 2022 and published by Routledge.